A trainer with holes in his socks shows up at Michael Jordan's door. Thirty days later, the most talented player alive is rebuilding himself from the smallest muscles up and Phil Jackson is installing a Zen offense designed to break the Jordan Rules.

For mental performance training for your team or your own game, visit https://www.skool.com/mindfit

This is Episode 3 of Season 1: The Making of Michael Jordan, The Cleaner. After three straight playoff losses to the Bad Boy Pistons, Jordan goes to war on himself. We go inside the Breakfast Club, the 5 AM training sessions where you didn't eat unless you finished the workout, and Grover's radical micro-stability methods that no NBA trainer in 1989 even had a vocabulary for. We trace Phil Jackson's unlikely path from the Pine Ridge Reservation and Lakota warrior philosophy to the triangle offense, the system Tex Winter spent forty years waiting to run at the highest level. And we land on the transformation that mattered most: Jordan learning emotional control, the moment he stopped fighting back and the Detroit Pistons realized they'd lost the one weapon that ever worked.

The mental performance lesson in this episode: physiological resetting, the deliberate skill of flushing the nervous system between possessions so the last play can't hijack the next one. Plus an early look at George Mumford, the mindfulness teacher Phil Jackson would later bring in to make this a daily discipline. By the end of this episode, Michael Jordan is fifteen pounds heavier, carrying a cold quiet focus, and the Chicago Bulls are about to meet the Pistons one more time.


KEY SOURCES
The Last Dance (ESPN/Netflix, 2020) • Tim Grover, "Relentless" (2013) • Phil Jackson, "Sacred Hoops" (1995) • Indian Country Today • CBS Sports • CNBC • Stack.com • Basketball-Reference

Hosted and narrated by Coach Dan, founder of MindFit Academy, mental performance training for coaches and parents of high school athletes.

For mental performance training for your team or your own game, visit https://www.skool.com/mindfit

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